Retail and strategic planning as well as marketing is becoming an increasing need in many retail stores such as shopping malls, supermarkets etc. Obtaining insight into customer behavior in the retail store which can serve as inputs for strategic management applications to manufacturers and retailers is therefore in great demand. Tracking movement of customers through the store and profiling shopping experience of the customer provides an unprecedented visibility into customer behavior and shelf activity.
Various conventional shopping cart identifications systems (SCIDs) are used to identify and track shopping carts but due to inherent limitations these SCIDs do not provide an efficient, accurate and cost effective solution. For example, environmental settings of a shopping mall may not be favorable for efficient functioning of certain hardware based SCIDs such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based systems, barcodes or reflective barcodes, Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, electronic device with wireless transceiver, infrared beacons, and magnetic sensors etc. Installation of such systems entails recurring maintenance and running costs such as cost of battery powered or data agent setups required by other systems. Drawbacks associated with computer vision based solutions is that traditionally image or video processing techniques are computationally expensive as well as complex and result in requirement of expensive Digital Signal Processing (DSP) kits and cameras as initial investment. Also, the computer vision based solutions do not provide accurate identification of shopping carts as the solutions do not cater to basic occurrences of a retail store setup that may inflict poor quality on image output.
In light of abovementioned disadvantages, there is a need for a system and method for identifying and tracking shopping carts in an economical viable and efficient manner. In addition, there is a need for a system and method that facilitates accurate recognition of identity data associated with shopping carts. Further, there is a need for a system and method that accurately identifies a shopping cart by overcoming poor quality such as noise and occlusion imposed by a retail store set up. Also, there is a need for a system and method which is simple, robust and cost effective with minimal complexities in interpretation of image representing identification of shopping cart and minimal disruption or alteration of the retail store infrastructure.